Essentially A2A is a search engine for the catalogues of respositories in both England and Wales. According to the website the index contains “contains 10.3 million records relating to 9.45 million items held in 418 record offices and other repositories”. This is a great tool for locating archives that contain information about particular people and places, but it does have it’s limitations.

The index was last updated in April 2008 and no new records are going to be added to the site (although there was supposed to be the facility for the existing records to be updated). Despite being effectively frozen in time, it is still a useful tool because it is said to “contain about 30 per cent of catalogues of archival collections in England and Wales.”

Searching is pretty straightforward, and you are probably better off heading straight for the advanced search page (shown below), rather than the quick search because of the ability to apply various restrictions on the search.

The amount of information contained in each catalogue entry varies widely, sometimes very little information is returned, but sometimes it is almost as good as viewing the actual record itself. Take for example the entry below which mentions so many of my TROWER relations.

Many respositories now have their own catalogues online, so it is always worth visiting their website and carrying out a search, but A2A is a great way of getting an overview of where the records might be found in the first place, and of course provides a single straight-forward interface for accessing many different catalogues.